Dr. Nicole LePera

So all of this is happening behind the scenes outside of our awareness, unless, of course, we choose to pay attention to it.

But all of that is then going to drive our behaviors, which, you know, for some instances can result in positive emotional states being transferred to other individuals around us.

But though in other instances, especially when it's stress or more difficult emotional states, we are communicating that without even words.

It's not even, oh, I have four extra minutes to play, right?

Immediately, it went to what I think some of us commonly know and maybe experience as the worst case scenario.

And specifically for me, it was like something happened to mom because that was really representative of the stress and the overall emotional state in my home.

But all of us, regardless of the home and the players that were present or not, the parents that were there and what they were capable of,

We are all, again, attuned to our environment in early childhood.

We don't have language, insight, maturity.

We can't zoom out and understand things with words and have things communicated to us in that very logical way.

However, we are still learning, and the learning is incredibly powerful.

In the psychological world, what we're talking about is implicit emotional memories or simply emotional memories.

Right.

So these things that, again, for some of us in adulthood, we can't give words to what's happening, but our heart is racing.

But we're bracing because, again, before language, everything that we've experienced, including the relationships that we were relying on for our physiological survival, changed.

Everything was encoded in our body as sensations and then as survival-driven responses, which is why some of us wake up in adulthood, right?

And we logically know things.

We know we're safe.

We know we're worthy, yet we still feel anxious, overwhelmed, and unworthy because that's the lived experience then of these old imprints that are coming alive again well after, right, the date or time or even relational status of our childhood.

Right.